Twitter Updates

It's a long time since we've had an article from any columnist providing quite such a superb, albeit unintentional, exemplification as did Yasmin Alibihai- Brown in her Independent column of 17th August of the futility of engaging in arguments about whether a given politician/columnist/commentator "is antisemitic" or not.

Alibhai-Brown sets out to demonstrate why it's utterly wrong to call British Labour Party lead candidate Jeremy Corbyn "an anti-Semite".

Hilariously, the subhead, which she may not have written or approved, states

"Some of the people the left-wing hopeful has been closest to are conscientious and ethical British Jews".

It may have escaped the Indie's sub-editors that that's a po-faced politically correct reformulation of "some of his best friends are Jews".

The right sort of Jews, not those sloppy and unethical British Jews who are not his best friends. And of course as utterly irrelevant to the issue of whether an individual embraces and promotes antisemitic ideas as it was when Sir Oswald Mosley, Leader of the British Union of Fascists used it to deny that he "was antisemitic", whilst having his Blackshirts march through the streets chanting, "The Yids, the Yids, the Yids! We've got to get rid of the Yids!"

And Corbyn himself resorts to another variant of "innocent by association" in the interview with Cathy Newman in the clip above. In response to her challenges about his associations with major promoters of antisemitic ideas, Corbyn indignantly tells us that his mother took part in the Communist Party organised Cable Street demonstration against Moseley's fascists in 1936, as if what his mother did almost eighty years ago had any bearing on what he does now.

It's interesting that a very familiar group of "AsAJews" have just produced a round robin letter slamming those who raise the question of Corbyn's associations with promoters of antisemitic ideas as "guilt by association".

Yet their hero's first resort to such questions is a defence of "innocent by association."

She's particularly skilled at condemning the antisemitism she's happy to acknowledge as antisemitism ( basically, that of the far right and any that can be found amongst the Tories), whilst writing paragraph after paragraph playing the "zionists call legitimate criticism of the state of Israel and its robotic hard line defenders antisemitism".

She also plays a very nice skilled variant on the "not an antisemitic bone in his body" line (always good, since who has ever found antisemitism embedded in the human skeleton?). Alibhai-Brown's version is "if he's antisemitic, I'm a white supremacist"-- with total subtlety reminding you that she's NOT WHITE.

That's her shtick...

The real trap here is to attempt to rebut her by agreeing to play this debate as a question of whether Corbyn IS or ISN'T antisemitic.

This is a completely wrong headed approach, as it's basically an issue about what's inside Corbyn's head. As it is about the head of anyone spouting or circulating antisemitic ideas, which is being presented or felt to be best addressed through an IS/ISN'T antisemitic debate.

The Torah teaches us that we judge people not by attempting to second guess what's in their heads, but by their acts-- what they do and what they say. And Torah assumes people have free will and the obligation to take responsibility for their actions.

In fact, we've just entered a month where we're expected to review our actions and speech over the last year and put right any wrongs we've done.

Queen Elizabeth I, like so many Elizabethans, knew and understood Torah a lot better than many of today's Jews and Christians. Not surprising, because the astonishingly beautiful translations into English by Coverdale and Tyndale of the Hebrew Bible were still new and exciting. Torah language and wise counsel, was adopted into every day language, and would be even more embedded in the language and speech habits of the ordinary English people with the publication of the King James bible after her death.

The words of the Torah in English electrified both the common people and the great poets and playwrights of her day. Shakespeare is saturated with phrases and sentiments directly taken from the English translations of the Hebrew Bible of his day.

Like Shakespeare, she used the language and the thought patterns of the Hebrew bible much more than she did the Greek-originated Christian New Testament.

She is reputed to have said-- in perfect Latin-- on unexpectedly succeeding to the throne of England

This is the Lord's doing and it is marvellous in our eyes.

She also said, in one of her greatest speeches:

Though God hath raised me high, yet this I account the glory of my reign, that I have reigned with your loves.

I have ever used to set the last Judgement Day before mine eyes, and so to rule as I shall be judged to answer before a higher judge.

Queen Elizabeth I was faced every day with a great issue of her times in England-- were there covert Roman Catholics working, like today's Islamist entryists, to subvert English religious freedom and the Protestant direct relationship with HKBH and return it to the dire rule of the Roman Catholics?

For if those people succeeded, that would mean handing over control of the minds of the people of England to the scrutiny of the Jesuit jihadis, ever ready to seek out new heretics to burn. It would return England to being a state under the ultimate rule of the Pope, as her sister Queen Mary had done.

And one of the most heinous sets of acts of murder in the name of religious purity Queen Mary supported was the burning to death at the stake of the translators, printers and publishers of the first English translators of the Bible, William Tyndale, John Rogers and Archbishop Cranmer amongst them. Needless to say, the English Bibles were also burnt.

I think we would do well to follow her example and resolutely refuse to enter into discussion into whether Person X or Person Y "is anti-semitic".

We could only know that via a window into their soul.

We should say, as I now always do-- I am not interested in the issue of whether someone "is antisemitic" or not. We can't know what sits in a person's head. The only thing that matters is-- do they say, endorse, circulate or excuse antisemitic ideas, explanations and images?

People who do that should be called out by having the antisemitic elements they're using or recycling pointed up and condemned for what they are.

We should point out also where such ideas, explanations and images incite and stoke up hateful and irrational behaviour, regardless of what the person responsible for invoking them claims about their own motives and inner moral purity ((or the person who uses the antisemitic content).

I've found that when I do this, the astonished and righteously indignant circulator of antisemitic ideas always tries to drag the discussion back to "I am not antisemitic/Are you saying I'm antisemitic/Honest Jeremy Corbyn, The People's Money Printer does not have an antisemitic bone in his body.

I always refuse and insist on pursuing the issue of pointing out the antisemitic content and its contribution to validating and stoking antisemitism.

This is an effective way to combat the most common straw man argument being used to defend the circulation of antisemitic ideas, posing as acceptable antizionism, in the UK today.

And right now you could make a real case that the message that’s coming out is one that’s essentially controlled by people that are perhaps more partisan to the situation inside the Gaza Strip than a lot of international journalists.

COOPER: Inside Gaza press control by Hamas is heavy-handed. There are few press freedoms inside Gaza, and Hamas controls who reports from there and where they can go.

While pictures of wounded children being are brought to hospital are clearly encouraged, we rarely see images of Hamas fighters or their rockets fired into Israel.

Politicians kissing babies is a cynical political ploy as old as politics

Politicians kissing dead babies, supposedly killed by your enemies, at an organized photo op to which the dead child has been brought as a prop is a gruesome new twist for the West's media to offer its readers. In the case of the Egyptian Prime Minister, the "enemy" is a country you have a peace and co-operation treaty with.

Of course, the death of any child in a conflict is a profound tragedy, above all for his or her parents and family.

But in this case, the Hamas regime decided that the toddler's corpse had a priority role to play as a prop for an image that would bind an image of the Egyptian Prime Minister and Hamas' regime "Prime Minister" Haniyeh together with the freshly dead child in a classic reworking of Pieta imagery for our time.

This took some news management. You have to think about the exchanges that must have gone on:

To the parents whose child has just died that minute. Was it: "Your son is a martyr, you must give him to us, we need him now to show the world!"?

To the hospital staff where the dead boy was taken, was it:" No, don't clean off the blood. Don't even close his eyes. We need to get there in time for the photo op with the Egyptian PM and our heroic leader."?

To the doctor who hauled the boy over as if he were a stray animal killed in a road accident was it:" C'mon, no time to lose. Get that martyr over here! Great idea to lift his t-shirt to show the blood!"?

Does this sound horrendously cynical? But it cannot have been one iota less cynical than the way in which the decision of the Hamas propaganda machine to put this death-porn propaganda stunt together was carried out, with the willing co-operation of the Egpytian and Hamas leaders, the assembly of Hamas-nominated press photographers assigned to the world's press agencies and broadcasters. And that includes the appalling way the body of the child was manhandled and treated without the reverence due to the dead.

And then the Mirror ran it totally uncritically without in questioning the veracity of this account beyond saying that Israel denied the death time. It used two images of the corpse of child who is said to have died earlier in a blast some way away without even speculating how that came to pass, other then by an "Israeli airstrike". Airstrike casualties rarely leave casualties in the relatively tidy pristine state in which the infant corpse, clearly freshly dead, is shown. It appears to have had no qualms about the ethics of allowing itself to be used for what was clearly a posed propaganda image which it is perfectly well aware has been created by a closed propaganda machine which could have taught the Stasi a lesson or two.

CNN on the other hand had a Hamas-nominated reporter visit the area in which the child was claimed to have been killed, who trudged wide-eyed round the hit-marked building in the area, noted the Hamas flags flying but spotted no evidence of military activity, whilst not referring to the standard Hamas practice of concealling its arms and firing apparatus under civilian homes and buildings.

Aljazeera English,as you might expect of a channel controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood-supporting Emir of Qatar, ran the story, in the clip above, as uncritically as the Mirror, including for good measure a radical Israeli associated with the virulently Israel-hostile +972 site who questioned whether Israel was telling the truth about its reported successes. Though other press coverage in the west also ran the baby-kissing image but pointed out that there was no confirmation that the child had indeed died as the result of an Israeli airstrike, and that the local Human Rights organizations were unable to verify the claim:

The boy's aunt, Hanan Sadallah, and his grief-stricken father Iyad — weak from crying and leaning on others to walk — said Mahmoud was killed in an Israeli airstrike. Hamas security officials also made that claim.

Israel vehemently denied involvement, saying it had not carried out any attacks in the area at the time. Gaza's two leading human rights groups, which routinely investigate civilian deaths, withheld judgment, saying they were unable to reach the area because of continued danger.

Mahmoud's family said the boy was in an alley close to his home when he was killed, along with a man of about 20, but no one appeared to have witnessed the strike. The area showed signs that a projectile might have exploded there, with shrapnel marks in the walls of surrounding homes and a shattered kitchen window. But neighbors said local security officials quickly took what remained of the projectile, making it impossible to verify who fired it.

Mahmoud's 12-year-old cousin Fares was injured in the right leg by shrapnel and was still visibly shaken several hours after the incident. "It's terrifying. I don't sleep at night," the boy said of the massive Israeli air attacks of the past three days. "I'm staying up all night."

Mahmoud's body was taken to Gaza City's main Shifa hospital around midmorning, just as Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas was showing Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Kandil around the wards of patients.

One of the Sadallah's neighbors, carrying the lifeless boy, pushed through a throng of Hamas security men to reach the politicians. Eventually, the two prime ministers were photographed cradling the child.

It was left to the New York Times, the equivalent of the Guardian in its routinely critical coverage of Israel, to point out the disparities between the supposed cause of the death--injuries from an F16 missile and the state of the child's body, and suggest that the death may have been caused by Palestinian ordinance going off accidentally:

But around 9:45 a.m., family members and neighbors said, an explosion struck a doorway near the Abu Wardah home, killing Aiman Abu Wardah as he returned from his errand, as well as Mahmoud Sadallah, 4, who lived next door and had refused his older cousin’s pleas to stay indoors.

“What is the truce? What does it mean?” the 22-year-old’s brother Mohammed, 27, asked as he mourned a few hours later.

It is unclear who was responsible for the strike on Annazla: the damage was nowhere near severe enough to have come from an Israeli F-16, raising the possibility that an errant missile fired by Palestinian militants was responsible for the deaths.

So where did the photographs from which Tom Parry sitting in London put together his "Egyptian PM weeps for Palestinian child" story come from? The story came from Associated Press in Gaza, which is of course totally controlled by Hamas. But the photographer used appears to have been contracted from Rex Features' Ashraf Amra Hamas propagandist, whose specialities appear to include posing children on bomb crater sites even more creatively than the Hamas machine usually does.

How can the Mirror and all the other sites that have used these images justify their use of such blatantly posed propaganda based on desecrating a dead child for whose death Israeli responsibility is far from having been established?

The Mirror site is still using the story without correction today, two days later and long after other sources have been questioning its veracity and purpose.

Galloway won a surprise stunning victory at Bradford West, where the ethnic/age profile of the electorate is not so very different from that at Rotherham. Ridley’s tweets indicate that she and Respect are using the same strategy, namely helping young first time Muslim voters to sign up with their help to vote by postal ballot for Respect. This strategy won in Bradford West.

@yvonneridley out on the stomp: “Just met some first time voters in Masbrough & they said they’ll vote #respect. Brill. ” #Rotherham

The Islamists associated with the Ramadhan Foundation and Mohammed Shafiq have also been pushing a candidate called Mahroof Hassain (one of their number) as an entryist Islamist Labour candidate. They’ve also been doing an Islamist advance on the local Labour Party. They weren’t successful but did a staged walk out when he wasn’t adopted. Here’s the narrative they’ll be spinning:

100 memberswalkout as @mahroofhussain not selected the only winner now likely tobe @yvonneridley another @respectpartyuk upset in the making

Here’s another line they and the Islamist support crew from all over the UK are going to be running in the campaign:

Ibrahim Hewitt ‏@ibrahimhewitt56@yvonneridley is standing for Respect in Rotherham by-election caused by resignation of Zionist Denis Macshane. Go for it Sis!

I wonder how the Jihadis and Respectniks ardently campaigning for Ridley will square her present persona with her actual history? Her current Wikipedia entry will tell you that she’s been married twice; her first husband was a PLO intelligence officer, and her second husband a detective with Northumbria police.

But dig around finding some of the press coverage from 2001 of her capture in Afghanistan, and you’ll find this:

Ridley’s trip to Afghanistan was more than her mother, Joyce, could cope with.More unforgivably, Ridley put her nine-year-old daughter, Daisy, through a rollercoaster ride of emotions. Perversely, the Express and other papers madeDaisy the main story. “Give me my mum back,” said the Sunday Express front-page headline. Ridley wrote in her first report after her release, “Today I’m lookingforward to Daisy getting cross with me because she didn’t know mummy had gone to Pakistan.”

What all this had to do with understanding Afghanistan’s people-Ridley’s motive for making the trip-was not clear. It certainly didn’t help the plight of her two Afghan guides who could be imprisoned for 15 years.

The British press did not to take kindly to Ridley. Alice Thomson, writing in the Telegraph, said: “By entering Afghanistan, she didn’t just jeorpardise herown life, she caused an extraordinary amount of trouble for everyone else.”

At first the Taliban thought she was an American spy. “Amreca! Amreca!” they cried, as she was paraded through the streets of Jalalabad. It wasn’t as wild an allegation as it first seemed.

The press were asked by the British ministry of defence not to report this, but up until three years ago, Ridley was a captain in the Territorial Army.

The most recent of her three ex-husbands, Ilan Hermosh, was less easy to silence. An Israeli citizen who runs a restaurant, he told Israeli Army Radio that he had”contacts with the intelligence services”. Besides, she had no passport or visa on her.

So, obviously, she is now single. (Ridley has been married three times: to Daoud Zaaroura, a former PLO officer and the father of her teenage daughter, Daisy; to a policeman; and to an Israeli businessman.) ‘No, I am actually married.’ For the fourth time? ‘Yes.’ She won’t tell me her husband’s name, though after a 20-questions-style routine, I find out that he is an Algerian she met ‘at various events’, and that he is ‘amazing … so far’. Under sharia, she was able to write her own wedding contract, in which she put down her hopes and expectations and even her exit strategy, were it to be necessary. What are her hopes and expectations? ‘For a happy, stress-free, committed marriage.’

Good luck with that…

It certainly helps your election chances with Respect on a ferociously anti-zionist ticket if you can forget that one of your husbands was an Israeli with, errm, contacts with Israeli intelligence, and on a ferociously anti-British-forces-in-Afghanistan ticket if you can also forget that you spent some years as an officer of the British Territorial Army….

Mind you, if she does get elected, will her fellow MPs have to address her as "the Honourable and Gallant Member for Rotherham"? It's a mind-boggling thought.

UPDATE

Helen Pidd in The Guardian reports the Great Walkout as if it was just some random group of members. This was in fact an organized display of intimidation by the Islamist entryists associated with Mohammed Shafiq and the Ramadhan Foundation, as can be seen very clearly from a look at Shafiq’s Twitter timeline, and those who retweet and exchange links and other tweeter names with him. Pidd presents the unsuccessful Islamist candidate Mahroof Jussain as just a very popular local Councillor who inexplicably failed to get selected. Where did she get her information about his popularity. Why didn’t she mention his connections with Islamist extremists?

She also fails to tell the Guardian's readers that this apparently dedicated popular local candidate also previously tried to get adopted as Middlesbrough's Labour candidate, supported on Twitter by the very same tweeters who were to go on and push Hussain as the popular choice at Rotherham.

What is mind-boggling is the dual involvement of the Ramadhan Foundation Islamist grouping in trying to insert and push Islamist candidates onto both the Labour and the Respect ticket. We all know about entryism, but this appears to be double-entryism. They are clearly organizing to get and recruit voting by Muslims, especially young first time voters, for Islamist candidates, and will push the emphasis wherever they think they are likely to win. They will also try and make the election debate at Rotherham a combination of capitalization on MacShane’s frauds and related “anti-zionism” plus Muslim grievances.

It’s also worth remembering that Rotherham is part of a Euro MEP super constituency which voted in a BNP member (amongst others) on a very low turnout. It was the BNP that took the action that led to MacShane’s expenses frauds being acted on, and they are going to work very hard to capitalise on that in the by-election.

There is very little time for Labour to organise. The Islamists have been organizing themselves for such opportunities for a long time.

Nobody, but nobody dreamed that Galloway would take Bradford West. Everyone of course was wise after the event.

There is plenty to attack Labour with apart from MacShane. Getting the vote out may be correspondingly difficult.

On 24th October, Tom Watson MP made sensational allegations, speaking in the House of Commons under the protection of Parliamentary privilege, of about evidence of a past paedophile ring linked to an aide of "a former Prime Minister" and a "powerful paedophile network" linked to No 10 at that time. In his blog, he added that the person in question was not Sir Peter Morrison, now dead and beyond the threat of libel actions, but unmistakably linking the accusations to Margaret Thatcher's Premiership.

Meanwhile, in Labour Rochdale, centre of a major child abuse scandal involving the abuse of young women in care in the town is currently under scrutiny in Parliament.The HoC Home Affairs Select Cttee in the very week following Watson's intervention grilled the senior Social Services professionals in Rochdale, and their bland "I didn't know, I wasn't told, I did everything I should" responses were remarkably similar to Entwistle's just before he resigned as Director-General of the BBC. What were the Labour MP and Cllrs doing during the period? Meanwhile, a Rochdale health services worker claimed that the abuse is still continuing, yet this astonishing testimony got little national coverage with the "Tory high-up paedophile" scandal running at full tilt.

A high profile by-election imminent is in the Labour seat of Rotherham, which manages to combine an almost identical running child abuse of girls in care scandal like Rochdale's, but where the by-election is happening because the Labour MP Denis McShane was forced to resign after being found to have fraudulently claimed thousands of pounds of expenses. The latter item was beginning to gain traction in the press just as Watson dropped his bombshell. McShane's misdemeanours sank into the back pages once "Tory paedophile rings" got taken up as the main story by media and BBC.

Another of the by-elections is in Middlesborough, caused by the death of Labour's Sir Stuart Bell, notorious for having led the fight in the last Parliament to have MPs' expenses kept secret on a range of grounds such as "security", and to have those who leaked them prosecuted. Bell also got a lot of stick in the last few years for ceasing to hold MP surgeries for constituents in Middlesborough. It was widely claimed that this was because he was living in Paris. Bell also achieved huge publicity by going after the child protection medics in the Cleveland child abuse scandal. He could not have known whether the allegations were true or false, but got huge newspaper and BBC coverage with his claims that the allegations were false.

There are elections for Police Commissioners in all areas outside London.

Also happening within a fortnight of Watson's bombshell. Margaret Moran, ex Labour MP goes on trial for £53,000 worth of fraudulent MPs' expenses claims. She will not face a full trial (and therefore a prison sentence) because she has medical certification stating she is not fit to stand trial.

Fraser Nelson at the Spectator thinks Tom Watson's motives are unrelated to anything else other than his siincere desire to unmask child abusers in high places, all coincidentally in Tory high places. Tom Watson has not raised any questions about or even hinted at any Labour folk in high places who have been alleged to have been involved in child abuse.

Nelson Jones at the New Statesman is equally convinced of Tom Watson's sincerity, but suggests that he's working himself towards becoming yet another conspiracy theorist:

Watson seems to be demanding a virtually unlimited inquiry into establishment paedophile networks that he has already decided must exist, and into a shadowy establishment cover-up that he is also presupposing. He had already issued an open letter to David Cameron, in which he vaunted his "experience of uncovering massive establishment conspiracies" and condemned "decorous caution" as "the friend of the paedophile". He came close to suggesting that Cameron himself might have reason to be part of a cover-up: "Narrowing the inquiry equals hiding the truth. That is the reality and it is not what you want."

This is the language of the witch-hunter, the conspiracy-theorist, or the architect of a moral panic down the ages. Is it really the language of a serious politician?

That's an impressively well-informed viewpoint. On the other hand.....it's remarkably helpful, no doubt, to the Labour Party that the words "paedophile network" now seem linked in the minds of a large proportion of the electorate to the words "high placed Tory".

Are his current efforts on associating highly placed Tories with paedophilia, at a time when Labour constituencies with upcoming elections are mired with scandals associated with corruption and child abuse, a distraction from or a masterly development of his role as Labour's by-election supremo?

Let’s hear it for Israel's mainstream left-wing newspaper, Ha’aretz, which can teach The Guardian a thing or two when it comes to publishing articles delegitimizing and demonizing israel, zionism and its democratically elected politicians.

And if Oren’s bit about Dana speaks to the appropriation that was, a different part of his speech constitutes a rewriting of the facts for the sake of waving gay rights as a fig leaf, perhaps the last for Israeli democracy, in order to obscure the injustices of the occupation. In both his speech as well as in an interview given later, Oren clamed that Israel was fighting for gay rights before the 1967 war. Perhaps Oren should be reminded that in 1967, and actually until 1988, homosexual intercourse was considered illegal under Israeli law. Despite the fact that the Attorney General issued instructions not to use that law when the subjects in question are men in a consensual relationship back in the 1950s, the shadow of discrimination has never really disappeared.

Israel did not fight for the rights of gays, not in the sixties nor in the seventies. Only at the end of the eighties and in the nineties, in the wake of vigorous activism on the part of members of the LGBT community and a small number of politicians who supported them, did any progress take place. This included the cancelation of the criminality of homosexual intercourse and the creation of a law and a ruling that would prevent discrimination. Now, said progress, part real and part imagined, is being appropriated for Israeli hasbara.

Here he explicitly states that the only reason for Israel to host and be publicly proud of having two Israeli-Palestinian LGBT centres is to divert attention from Israeli oppression of Palestinians:

While the headquarters of two LGBT Palestinian organizations that operate in both Israel and in the West Bank are located in Israel, the state does not give them “shelter,” and their appropriation for Israel’s propaganda needs is outrageous – not only because of the ongoing oppression of Palestinians in Israel and in the territories, but also because the appropriation is done in order to divert the conversation from Palestinian oppression in an attempt to present Israel as a liberal democracy.

The protesters, among them Israelis, were right to blame Oren for what is known across the world as “pinkwashing.

The clip at the head of this post from a young Palestinian woman involved in the organizations Gross' article slams as propaganda ruses makes clear that the issue of Palestinian gay identities and Israeli ones alike is a profoundly complex and individual as well as collective one for both Israeli and Palestinian gays. It belies the simplistic and partisan reductionist smearing Gross presents.

Israel is a state whose legal and official policy framework grants quite remarkable legal rights, freedoms and protection from harassment and discrimination to lesbians and gays, unknown in the rest of the Middle East and many other countries of the world. Culturally, Israel is far from having a monolithic attitude to lesbians and gays, ranging from active condemnation and hostile campaigning from some Haredi groups to overt courtship and celebration by far left secular parties such as Meretz and an extraordinarily lively lesbian and gay scene in Tel Aviv.

By contrast, in both the Palestinian Authority and in Hamas-controlled Gaza, not only is homosexuality viewed as an unacceptable individual and social evil, but there is no shortage of cases which show that families and communities, whether Muslim or Christian, are prepared to execute their own relatives and members found to be involved in homosexual activity, let alone taking up gay advocacy

As Fabian from Israel pointed out in a recent comment on a previous post, the underlying political theme is that a Jewish state founded on zionism, like the traditionally anti-semitic stereotype of the Jew, is inherently evil, murderous, bent on domination and dispossession and deceptive with it. If it does good for a persecuted section of its enemies, that’s solely to sugarcoat and gloss over its evil actions.

And his view, with which I agree, is– that’s anti-semitism. Because I can’t think of any other contemporary state to which such inherent and ineradicable motives of radical bad faith are attributed and made the subject of a worldwide campaign for which no objective evidence is ever adduced.

For example, have you ever seen an article suggesting that the UK or the US gave refuge to persecuted gays from Iran solely in order to cover up their supposed crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and which in the course of doing so reminds you that homosexual acts were punishable under UK law with imprisonment till 1957?

Have you ever seen a blog post from the gay activists promoting the “pinkwashing” campaign against Israel, or any other gay activists, accusing David Cameron of making speeches sympathetic to gay marriage and highlighting the UK's positive attitudes to gay rights solely to gloss over and divert attention from the UK’s persecution of its Muslim community and its participation in supporting the campaign to destroy Muslim freedom struggles and resistance movements worldwide?

Be careful before you rejoice over the Hollande victory. His magic wand politics is based on selling the idea of socialism in one Eurozone-- based on getting all the other EU countries' populations also to vote socialist so they can set up a superKeynsian programme where the whole of the EU happily prints money and hands it out for whatever benefits the good citizens have become accustomed to.

Thus, he promises an instant end to austerity, job creation a la carte, restoring cuts in pensions public spending etc.

This is very appealing to electorates feeling the pinch and hating the austerities of getting rid of deficits for years ahead.

Imagine if Hollande is able to sustain this illusion for 2-3 years as first the Eurocrats indulge him in order to ensure the Eurozone doesn't break up.Then a whole series of other EU states also vote in magic wand Eurozone keynsian socialist governments, Apparently even in Germany, the votes for the Social Democrats are soaring. So then what happens if these magic wand programmes are voted for across the EU (including in the next EU elections)?

Come 2015 we could be facing Ed Miliband offering a UK version of Hollande's magic wand programme, with crowds of happy deficit fuelled populations across the EU as examples of how well the magic wand works. It means signing up to the new socialist print-as-much-as-you-want Euro. So Ed Mili is right behind an EU referendum, only this time on a "free money, end to austerity, magic wand" embrace-the-Euro programme. The Lib Dems will be enthusiastic supporters

The Tories and UKIP would then be the only parties opposing this glorious magic wand socialist vision. They'd get their referendum. But guess what? They'd lose it hands down, because the euphoria of the free money vision would be far more appealing than the Sturm und Drang of leaving the EU and yet more austerity.

If you doubt this, remember that until Livingstone dreamed up his Fare Deal magic money offer, he was hopelessly behind Boris in the polls. Once that was offered, his popularity soared. Had Andrew Gilligan & Guido Fawkes not exposed his tax avoidance and matching hypocrisy, people would have accepted his promises as credible. Once the tax evidence was out (including Livingstone's failure to deliver on his promise of publishing his accountant-certified tax records) and widely exposed, people stopped believing in the magic beans fare reductions. Boris' popularity and credibility recovered, but the gap between him and Livingstone never went back to what it was before the launch of the Fare Deal promise.

Even so, over a million people voted for Livingstone's magic wand, magic beans, free money programme and for him, knowing that he was an habitual liar and serial promise breaker.

Botis and his reality programme only just --just-- won. And a major reason for that was the strength of Boris' personality and personal appeal compared with the very negative features and track record of Livingstone.

67. Claim: “In each year I was mayor, anti-semitic attacks [in London] declined” (Guardian, March 26; when pressed about his poor relationship with the Jewish community)

Reality: The London figures, from the Community Security Trust’s annual reports, are as follows (reports before 2003 are not readily available online):

2003: 215 2004: 311 2005: 213 2006: 300 2007: 247 2008: 236As will be seen, the number of anti-semitic attacks in London rose substantially – by up to 45% – in two of these years.

Hosting extremist cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi

84. Claim: “All I knew about Qaradawi when he came was that the Sun had praised him as a true voice of Islam.” (Newsnight 4 April)

Reality: Livingstone had actually been furiously lobbied by liberal, Jewish and gay groups not to host Qaradawi. A Labour Home Office minister, Fiona McTaggart, pulled out of the City Hall event with the hate preacher, urging Ken not to meet him and saying that “a perfectly good cause had been hijacked” by Qaradawi and his supporters. The shadow home secretary, David Davis, asked Ken not to give Qaradawi “the oxygen of publicity.” When Qaradawi touched down in the UK, the Sun in fact proclaimed: “The evil has landed.”

The video clip I've included with this post shows that so many of Livingstone's present aims, especially that of establishing London as a city-state go back to the Trotskyist programme of the Socialist Action group coterie who were his highly paid enforcers when he was Mayor, and whose Simon Fletcher is the head of his campaign team today.

What a stain on the record and reputation of the Labour Party. I heard Miliband parroting Livingstone’s election promises to slash fares and restore the EMA on BBCR4 a few days ago, claiming he’d be the best Mayor for London. As they say, the fish stinks from the head.

At 3:35 into this clip, you'll hear Ken Livingstone make the astounding anti-semitic claim that Orthodox Jewish laws of religious conversion are racist and that they originate from the same late nineteenth century German racist exclusivist ideologies that culminated in Nazism.

You wait apparently forever for some unambiguous evidence that, yes, Ken Livingstone really has uttered anti-semitic statements, despite his pious denials, then three eye-popping bits come along at once.

Thanks to the hard work of Joseph K published as a comment on this post yesterday, here's a transcript of the context and the key words used by Livingstone in the course of chairing this 2010 Press TV broadcast reviewing a polemical anti-zionist book on zionism:

Is not the problem here that when Zionism was conceived of back in the 1880s, the world was one that accepted racial division… The Germans talked about anyone of German blood, even if it had been a thousand years since they left, able to come back. The world broadly accepted this racism at all levels, and that was the origin of Zionism – ‘every other group is racially selective, we will do it’.

We see that today in this ridiculous situation that that whereas Christianity and Islam massively goes out there to convert people to its [sic] faith, it’s very difficult to convert into Judaism. I think it’s a real problem, there’s this racial exclusiveness that has its origins in that dreadful time… 1880s, when all nations suffered from it.

As ignorantly wrong about the history he claims to be drawing on as he is about the teachings of Christianity and Judaism, Livingstone targets Judaism as a different religion that is racist and intolerant, unlike Christianity and Islam. His “history” of the conversion rules of Judaism being based on nineteenth century German racial exclusivism is a total and malign fantasy calculated to represent Judaism and Nazism as having the same roots. Equating zionism and Nazism are central features of anti-semitic anti-zionism.

Making Judaism difficult to convert to goes back to Talmudic times, not long after the period of Rabbi Hillel and Jesus of Nazareth and although the Rabbis made it more difficult in the centuries following the Jewish Diaspora, has nothing to do with the rise of political zionism in the mid to late nineteenth century.

Judaism is not interested in race. A child is Jewish if he or she is the child of a Jewish mother, whether he or she is black, like the Jews of India, Ethiopia and many parts of the Maghreb, or pale skinned, blond haired and blue eyed, like some of the Jews of Poland and Russia, frizzily dark haired and curved-nosed like many of the Jews of Germany, or has the characteristic skin colour and eyes of the children of Jewish converts who came from Japan and China. Anyone can convert to Judaism, provided they are not the children of a sexual union ruled illicit in the Torah, such as an incestuous union. All shades of zionist movement (of which there are many, both secular and religious, socialist and economically conservative), have always accepted that anyone born or converted according to Orthodox Jewish rules is eligible for citizenship of the Jewish state, wherever they live in the world.

Religious zionism however goes back to the first Psalms of the first period of Jewish exile to Babylon, which yearn for the return by the entire people to the homeland, both the land of Israel, and Zion-- the City of Jerusalem. They have been sung and chanted by religious Jews everywhere in the world as part of the prayers which accompany every meal they ate for almost two thousand years and continue to this day. Every orthodox Jewish wedding going back to the earliest exile days has begun with an invocation to "Let us go up to Jerusalem" taken from the Song of Solomon and other Hebrew Bible texts

Each and every Orthodox Jewish prayer service is suffused with repeated scriptural readings and prayers which long for the return of the whole people to”our Land” and to Jerusalem, which the Jews have always prayed to be granted “speedily and in our days” and continue to pray for today.

Small groups of religious Jews, including some of the most renowned Jewish Rabbis of history such as Maimonides and Rabbi Yitzchak Luria continued to make pilgrimages to and even settle in various areas of present day Israel and the West Bank, particularly the Old City of Jerusalem, Safed and Hebron going back many hundreds of years. The birth of modern political zionism is manifestly not a copying of the emergence of proto Nazi racism in the 1880s, but a complex series of movements which first started being articulated in the wake of the Enlightenment and the 1848 revolutions.

Modern political zionism first became a mass movement not because of German ideology but because of the rise of new post Enlightenment state-organized forms of persecution of assimilated and unassimilated Jews alike across European countries from republican France to Tsarist Russia. But all were in their different ways rooted in Jewish scriptures and traditions of study leading to action.

There was always a minority orthodox religious current in political zionism that sought to persuade Jews to return to Zion so that they could more fully observe Jewish religious practice, including the Torah religious obligation to live in the land of Israel and the range of religious commandments that can only be observed in Israel and Jerusalem.

Livingstone however strives to smear zionism as a monolithic racist movement explicitly derived and descended from the very same racially exclusivist roots as Hitler’s Nazism. That's anti-semitic enough. But then to smear the ancient Talmudically rooted laws of conversion to Judaism as having the very same roots originating in the same period is on an altogether more malignant form of anti-semitism, falsely smearing Judaism as racist and the racism concerned sharing its origins with Nazism.

That fits very comfortably with the ideologies of the current Iranian regime which Livingstone has professed himself to be so much as in opposition to.

Yesterday, a post on Harry's Place featured this video of Livingstone addressing a meeting of Londoners to organize against the EDL.

He claimed to be speaking against ethnic and religious division, but his speech airbrushes out the inheritance of Judaism, seeking to place the Jewish Talmudic Sage of Israel, Rabbi Hillel in what he refers to as what we like to think of as Palestine, by which he in fact means the present day state of Israel where Hillel lived and studied.

Livingstone then talks of Jesus, likewise of Ancient Israel, also without mentioning that he was an observant Jew who regarded himself as such, as coming along several hundred years later than Rabbi Hillel. In fact, they were virtually contemporaries drawing on identical Jewish scriptures and traditions and there are far more similarities in their religious teaching and practice than there are differences. Livingstone claims that Jesus of Nazareth never once uttered a single sentence of intolerance of anybody. He seems not to have come across these quotations of the words of Jesus from the Christian Gospels which include some of those most at variance with rabbinical Jewish teaching :

“Then shall he also say unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting FIRE, prepared for the devil and his angels.”

“It would be better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he was cast into the sea, than that he should cause one of these little ones to stumble.”

“Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.’

“For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; 3and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.”

“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves,And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.”

The implications of both this talk and the Press TV one, is that while Christianity to some extent, and particularly Islam (based centrally on one small extract from Mohammed's final sermon, and ignoring some more problematic issues with different interpretations of Mohammed's teachings as a whole by some groups of its followers) are exemplary in teaching racial tolerance, Judaism is not, and incorporates Nazi-style racism in its very conditions for joining the religion.

If we do want to look for some shocking examples of religious bigotry born of ignorance and malice which Livingstone decries in his talk to the Unite meeting, we need look no further than Livingstone himself speaking on Press TV just a year earlier and in this talk.

There are many who swear that Livingstone is not anti-semitic, notably Ed Miliband, who famously declared, albeit meaninglessly, that he "does not have an anti-semitic bone in his body". Actually, I am inclined to believe that were there three or four million Jewish voters in London and Israel owned the oil supplies of the western world and the Islamic countries had none, he might be regularly heard courting Jews and actually learning something about Judaism. Maybe.

In fact the question of whether Livingstone "is" anti-semitic or not is not as relevant as the fact that he chooses to use anti-semitic tropes and smears for political purposes,just as he is currently uttering the expression of believers' piety for the Islamic prophet Mohammed, "peace be upon him". Only in the case of his anti-semitic utterances, his reasons for doing so are malign and utterly discreditable, and over the last few years they seem to run very closely parallel to the anti-semitic views and eliminationist "ideals" central to the politics of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian regime.

At 3:16 minutes into this clip, you'll hear Ken Livingstone, speaking in 2009 in Tower Hamlets, push this anti-semitic conspiracy smear against Labour MP Ivan Lewis and a Jewish "they" who he says conspired to keep the voice of the elected representatives of the Palestinian people silenced by keeping it out of the mainstream press.

Here's my transcript of the key section:

A character called Ivan Lewis who- I discovered- I'd seen hanging round the House of Commons, and he's saying- I'd assumed he was a lobbyist for the Israeli government- I'd no idea he was a Labour MP! [laughter] And he'd been given a job, because he’s one of that small group of Labour MPs who only ever seems to talk about the defence of the state of Israel, and denounce any Arab that may have a different point of view! And he came out and said, I had made a huge mistake in having this interview, and publishing it, and I assumed avalanche of denunciations and outrage, and how someone like me should never stand for mayor again or something! And then, it went completely quiet – a little bit in the Jewish Chronicle in the next week – and of course! – the last thing they wanted to do, was, they realised this-- a lot of denunciations would mean people would buy it! More of them would read it!

I wish there had been more denunciations! I wish great extracts of it, had been published in the Sun! And the Daily Mail! And the Express! They’re not gonna do that. So, do get hold of copies of that, and just take a few photocopies and circulate it amongst your friends, groups at work, in your community, so more people get to see that. The silence spoke volumes, of how they don’t really don't want the Palestinians to express themselves through their elected leaders.

What Livingstone doesn't say is that Ivan Lewis’ statement was made in his capacity as a then junior Foreign Office Minister of State in Gordon Brown’s Labour government. It was issued by the Foreign Office in support of the official and continuing foreign policy of the UK, of considering Khaled Meshaal to be the head of a designated terrorist organization. It’s still on the Foreign Office web site to this day.

Here, Livingstone contrives to misrepresent and spin this story using some modern classic anti-semitic conspiracy stories.

Firstly, Lewis supposedly did nothing in the House of Commons but speak for Israel, and in such a way that he could have been assumed to be a lobbyist of the Israeli government. Not only that, but on that basis he'd been "given a job".

Lewis had in fact been a junior Minister in the Blair and Brown Labour governments going back to June 2003, when he took on a succession of roles in the Education ministry, going on in 2005-2006 to being a junior Treasury minister , to May 2006 when he was given responsibilities for Care Services in the Health Ministry. He was then promoted to a junior role in the Foreign Office as Parliamentary Secretary of State for International Development by Gordon Brown in October 2008 and further promoted to the Minister of State role in June 2009.

Whether Livingstone's reference to him being "given a job" was to Lewis' former role as Vice Chair of the Labour Friends of Israel, or to his Ministerial role at the time is unsurprisingly, given Livingstone's reputation for political evasiveness, unclear. If it is the latter, the smear implies that he got his job as a Minister because he was a lobbyist for Israel.

Whichever way, there is no way Lewis could have made the statement he did out of personal animus, let alone, as Livingstone suggests, as a mouthpiece of the Israeli government or some shadowy "they" Jewish lobby.

All UK government ministers, however junior, are required to make only statements which are fully in line with the UK government policies and priorities of the day. The Foreign Office will only publish statements which conform with those policies. And the policies include condemning Israeli settlements over the Green Line as being illegal, as well as supporting radical anti-zionist Palestinian groups protesting against Jewish purchasers of homes in the overwhelmingly Palestinian-inhabited quarters of East Jerusalem and Hebron. Any Minister who uses his position to voice the view of any lobby group great or small which conflicts with government policy will find himself, quite rightly, instantly relieved of his office and sent back to the back benches.

In fact so far was Lewis from being in any position to impose his views on the government of Gordon Brown that in 2008, he was regarded as having had his personal reputation deliberately undermined in a classic Gordon Brown coterie revenge attack job, because he'd had the temerity to publish a highly coded criticism about the Brown administration's need to refresh and renew itself.

Then we come to Livingstone's portrayal of Lewis as the mouthpiece of the unspecified Jewish “they,” who then conspired to make no further condemnations of the propaganda coup Livingstone gave Hamas, because "they" wanted to see the interview kept out of view. This was supposedly because "they" realised that "they'd" end up drawing the attention of ordinary British people to his very rosy presentation of Damascus resident and Hamas terrorist group leader Meshaal, who he pushes as those of the elected representative of the Palestinian people. Khaled Meshaal was incidentally never elected to the leadership of Hamas by the Palestinian people; it's difficult to find any evidence that he ever reached any position through any election, let alone a free one involving the Palestinian electorate.

Livingstone conveniently makes no reference to the more damning reasons Lewis cited in his Foreign Office condemnation of Livingstone's action in choosing to fly to Damascus to interview Meshaal and use the entirely supportive interview as the big central feature of his guest edited New Statesman:

It is therefore particularly regrettable that he learned the wrong lessons from history by handing a propaganda coup to the leader of a terrorist organisation.

Hamas has not only breached international law by firing rockets at civilian populations in Israel but continues to violate the human rights of Palestinians in Gaza“.

I posted a couple of weeks ago on the significance of the role the New Statesman played in 2009 in Ken Livingstone's campaign to rebrand himself from tired dinosaur far left has-been to contest-winning candidate for the Labour Party nomination for the London 2012 Mayoral election. I included a link to this fisking of the interview and the way Livingstone conducted it.

The New Statesman gave Livingstone the opportunity of a lifetime by inviting him to be a guest editor, with carte blanche to determine the main features and most of the content of the magazine, at the crucial period just before the Labour Party Conference of that year. And it's clear that in making the speech to the Tower Hamlets PSC back late in 2009, long before the Labour Party nomination for its candidate for the Mayoral election 2012 was decided, Livingstone saw the Hamas interview as central to securing the nomination in mid 2010. He fantasises about a goal of the imagined conspiracy of the Jewish "them" to being to prevent it.

It's not clear why the New Statesman did so much to help Livingstone on his way to the nomination. Martin Bright, the most high profile NS Political editor in recent years had left early in 2009. He had played a major role with a series of articles and contributed to a Channel 4 TV programme in exposing Livingstone's far left coterie and manipulation of his then Mayoral office, which contributed to his defeat by Boris Johnson in 2008.

It's not clear whether it was the new editor and management of the NS who first decided to given Livingstone the guest editorship, or whether it was the result of an initiative from Mehdi Hasan or some other key NS staffer.

It's very curious that although the New Statesman WIkipedia site lists the people who have been offered guest editorships of the magazine since the start of 2009, there's just one left out. And that's Ken Livingstone.

In the New Statesman in the week following the Foreign office statement, the anonymous “Staff blogger” quoted the statement, whilst dropping in the additional information that Lewis was formerly chair of Labour Friends of Israel (in fact, he was actually Vice Chair).

However, the “staff blogger” did not attempt to suggest Lewis was still actively acting as a Labour Friends of Israel spokesman, since he would have had to relinquish that position on being appointed to the Foreign Office.

No such reservations held back Muslim Brotherhood-supporting Islamist mouthpiece for the Muslim Council of Britain, Inayat Bunglawallah, writing in the Guardian that same day in September 2009> He's always been a routine promoter of tropes about ” traditional zionist tactics” of attempting to “silence critics of Israel”. Here’s what he wrote about Ivan Lewis’s statement and his affiliations:

It is worth noting that Lewis did not appear similarly outspoken during the visits to the UK of Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli PM, and Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, despite the very credible reports of Israeli war crimes perpetrated in Gaza during the Israeli bombardment and invasion in December 2008/January 2009 as documented by Amnesty International, the Israel campaign group Breaking the Silence and, most recently, by the UN fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict.

Indeed, while the bombing of Gaza was going on earlier this year, Lewis attended an Israel solidarity rally in Manchester, where he declared: “It is essential that we send a clear and responsible message from the great city of Manchester that this community stands shoulder to shoulder with Israel.”

Just as Livingstone left out the key contextual information in his speect, Bunglawallah didn’t mention in his article that at the time of all those events, Lewis was not a Foreign Office minister, so would have had no official role in making statements about visits by Israeli politicians and the events of Cast Lead.

It also makes it all abundantly clear whose politics Livingstone was following then and now on the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And they certainly weren’t those of the Labour Party then or now.

Hilary Smith, Co-op member and Boycott Israel Network (BIN) agricultural trade campaign coordinator, was quoted by The Guardian as saying that the Co-op "has taken the lead internationally in this historic decision to hold corporations to account for complicity in Israel's violations of Palestinian human rights. We strongly urge other retailers to take similar action."

The Co-op has fallen over itself to announce that, no, they're not actually boycotting Israel, you understand. Just any Israeli companies that deal with produce from not just the West Bank, but any from over the Green Line. So that will include all the wines from the Golan Heights, and matzos and other religious goods baked or made in the Old City of Jerusalem but also all the produce that's exported from Gaza. And of course all the produce which Palestinian farmers in the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights produce.

You see, Palestinian Arab farmers are completely dependent on the high-tech logistics and technologies of the Israel-wide exporters like Agrexco, Mehadrin and all those other companies the Co-op's decided to boycott for the fast processing, refrigeration, air transport, EU certification and marketing. Without those companies exporting their produce to the UK, guess what? Those Palestinians will lose money hand over fist, if they're not driven completely out of business, by the loss of their currently very efficient Israeli exporters. There aren't any other local non-Israeli companies they can turn to. Try Jordan or Egypt? Not a chance.

Here's the viewpoint of a Gazan woman producer whose business and family was hit by the closing of the route to Europe via Agrexco after the Israelis shut the Keren Shalom checkpoint after an outburst of Hamas terrorist action.

Um Hajjar Al-Ghalayini, 46 years old, owns half an acre of sandy Gaza land that produces two tons of strawberries every season. Since her husband died two years ago, the crop is the sole means of support for her nine children, mother-in-law and widowed sister, so every one of the bright red berries counts.

Last year, she had no choice but to sell her produce to the local market. That filled the Gaza markets with fruits and vegetables to the benefit of consumers, but for growers like Um Hajjar it was a disaster. Her earnings dropped by more than half and the family had a tough year economically. This week, as Israel took another step in easing its economic blockade of the Gaza Strip, Um Hajjar delivered her strawberries to the Kerem Shalom checkpoint on the Israel-Gaza border, their first leg of a journey to the more profitable markets in Europe.

“Now I can say that things are getting back to normal, if not on the right track,” she told The Media Line.

Just last week in London, Livingstone declared himself against boycotts of Israeli goods and services at a meeting with Jewish Londoners. His Deputy Mayoral candidate running mate Val Shawcross proudly declared herself a member of the Co-operative Party.

The Co-operative Group is formally affiliated with the Co-operative Party which although nominally independent is an organization whose sole party political link is to the Labour Party. Co-operative Party election candidates stand for election as Labour candidates.

So, apart from Livingstone and Val Shawcross, there's a long list of 29 Co-operative Party MPs, who include many who are usually supportive of Israel and strongly opposed to boycotts. Those MPs include Louise Ellman, Luciana Berger, Stephen Twigg and Mike Gapes amongst others. And quite a few of them are London Assembly members, too, like Nicky Gavron and Murad Qureshi.

Are they in favour of boycotting the produce of Palestinian farmers? Do they think kosher wines from the Golan Heights and matzos baked in the Old City of Jerusalem should be boycotted?

Will the Labour London Assembly members be pressing for Palestinian and Israeli produce exported by Agrexco, Mehadrin and the other companies fingered by the Co-op to be banned from the GLA's premises?

"We will not finance any organisation that advocates discrimination and incitement to hatred."

The right to freedom of speech underpins the values of a democratic society and individuals and organisations should be free to express their views or beliefs. However, 99% of customers who participated in the review supported the bank's decision to withhold finance from those extremist organisations that advocate not only discrimination but hatred.

Can Livingstone, Val Shawcross and all those Co-op MPs and London Assembly members let us know whether they support the Viva Palestina project of collecting funds which are given to Hamas regime officials? Can they also explain to us how they are satisfied that the Co-op Bank is not contravening its own policies in allowing itself to be used to collect and pass wads of used banknotes to and through Hamas, which has a stellar record of suppressing free speech and inciting hatred of Jews and Israel, not least through its own Charter?

If they think the money is just going to charitable work and is untouched by the Hamas hate machine, what are the processes they have used to monitor that?

Oh, and by the way, that's bankers in the spotlight again, isn't it? Only somehow, I can't quite see Ed Miliband getting up on his hind legs to fulminate about this at Prime Minister's Question Time, can you?